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Engineered just for you: pharmaceutical-grade yoghurt

This article was taken from the May 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

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Forget popping pills: patients could get better by eating yoghurt. Richard Yu, an investigator at the Molecular Sciences Institute, Berkeley, is a yoghurt hacker. He describes the dairy product as a "scalable drug-distribution system". By splicing DNA into the genes of Lactobacillus bulgaricus, a bacterium used to make yoghurt, he believes personalised medicines could be delivered in a palatable format. "If you send someone a packet of dried yoghurt powder that's been engineered, and you have milk and a plastic tub, you can make this stuff," Yu says. "You don't need a fermenter, you don't need a standard molecular biology lab: you need a kitchen counter."

Yu is a cofounder of Yovivo! Probiotic. The team's first project involves cutting and pasting the four genes responsible for turning amino acids into resveratrol -- a substance that has been linked in human trials to moderating blood sugar levels and improving circulation in adults.

The DIY-bio approach could be applied to more than health: production of MDMA, say, or other more dangerous drugs could be democratised by the method. "The barriers to entry are very low,"

Yu says. As a result, his team is taking a cautious approach: "Unleashing designer organisms inside your cells, you have to be very careful," he says. "We want to do it properly. We're not cackling scientists, bubbling cauldron and whatnot."

Other notable yoghurt hacks:

Replacing toothpaste In 2008, MIT created a Lactobacillus bulgaricus that makes a tooth-decay-preventing peptide.

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Midnight snacking Indie Biotech, an open-source biotech site, created a recipe for fluorescent yoghurt in 2011.